Monthly Archives: April 2012

I’ve been frustrated that certain Amazon Japan orders won’t ship to the U.S. (i.e. used CDs through 3rd parties). I found a service called Tenso.com that gives you a Japanese mailing address and ships your items to the U.S. I just placed my first Amazon Japan order using my new Tenso address. I’m not sure if I entered my Tenso address correctly at Amazon. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m not good at navigating iTunes Japan yet let alone iTunes. I just found a bunch of Bandai collections. They’re called Bandai Channel Special Selection. Searching “Bandai” doesn’t give you much. This link to the King Gainer Pack will pull up some more Bandai collections. These links will help you find anime on iTunes U.S. and iTunes Japan.

Many of the songs begin with Chii saying cute phrases. There’s also a mix version of Let Me Be With You by Round Table. It’s a shame Pioneer Music went out of business here in the U.S. I wish I would have started my collection earlier. I bought this CD used. I buy my CDs used if they’re cheaper.Chobits Original Soundtrack 001

I didn’t think I’d like live action dramas. I’ve been engrossed in anime until recently. I gave them a try early this year and was pleasantly surprised. I think of them as live action anime. I started watching them on Crunchyroll and have made some DVD purchases as well. Coffee Prince has been my favorite so far which introduced me the actress Yoon Eun Hye. Her character is very moe.

I had high hopes of receiving Kirameki Project: Theme Songs for a good price ($21.99). Amazon sent me a notice my order was cancelled due to lack of availability. I can’t get it cheaply now. I can’t even buy it from Amazon Japan because it’s OOP. I made a tough choice a ordered the soundtrack instead ($36.25). Those songs are TV size which I’m bummed about.

What sucks about Amazon Japan is you can’t purchase from 3rd parties. I’ve tried and I get a notice saying they can’t ship it out of Japan. Also, you can’t by Japanese iTunes cards or MP3s from their site.

Infinite Stratos is turning out to be a fun title. The funniest moment so far is Rin putting oil on Cecilia. Cecilia intended Ichika to oil her up–including the parts she “couldn’t reach.” Well, the picture above is how it turned out.

Patlabor Complete Vocal CollectionThere’s a lot of great music on the Patlabor Complete Vocal Collection. I was familiar with the OP and ED but I don’t know where all this music came from. I especially like the tracks by the female vocalist MANA. She’s somewhat obscure although I see her credited for songs in Dirty Pair Flash and a few albums in the early ’90s.

Select the playlist in iTunes by clicking on it. Right-click and select “Export…” from the pop-up menu.

Save as a text file .txt

Import the text file in Excel (I’m using Office 2010). Choose delimited and select unicode UTF-8 as the file origin IF you have a foreign language like Japanese. Click finish.

Delete any columns you like. You will need a plug-in for Excel to create an xml and xsd file. Go to this Microsoft page. Follow the instructions on that page.

In Dreamweaver click the Spry tab and click the Spry Data Set icon.

Select XML as the data set. Browse the the XML file you created with Excel. Dreamweaver will also ask you for the xsd file you created with Excel. You’ll be walked through a wizard. Make sure and choose the options you want (i.e. sortable columns).

Upload the files to your site.

Here is an anime music playlist I created. Clicking the table headers lets you sort the column data.

Tips:

To change iTunes bytes column to megabytes create a new column and enter the following formula =ROUND((D2/1024/1024),1) where “D2″ equals your first cell with bytes. When your cursor changes to a thin plus sign drag that formula into all the cells below. Format the new column as text. Copy and past it again using the values option. Delete the original bytes column and the 1st column you created.

To change iTunes seconds column to mm:ss create a new column and enter the following formula =INT(E2/60)&”:”&INT(MOD(E2,60)) where E2 contains the first cell with seconds. Use the same instructions above to populate and delete columns. Unfortunately, using this method will not allow you to properly sort this column so keep it as seconds if you want to sort it. What I did was sorting the data by time before editing then leave “sort column” as “none” using the wizard for a default time sort.

Remember to format your number cells as numbers so they properly sort.

You can also use Google Docs if you don’t have your own site. You can skip the XML steps that way too.

I use Google Translate to help me with Japanese CD listings. It works pretty good for the most part. It also gives you a romanji translation which is pretty accurate. The English translation needs some work though. I tried to translate a song title from my Gunbuster soundtrack. The title was:

Hinotori has a great soundtrack including a great orchestral opening. BTW, the opening has the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata as background melody. The CD artwork is beautiful. I thought this came with Mika Nakamisha’s Hi no Tori (the anime’s ED) but I guess not. That’s okay as I have it on her Music CD.